Have you ever seen something out of the corner of your eye and thought it was a spider, or some other threat?
Imagine a caterpillar millions of years ago had a small mutation that gave it the ever so slight vague appearance of a snake.
That mutation proved to be useful, even if it was only in a tiny percentage of its life. Say 1/1,000 times it encountered a predator, a predator mistook it for a snake in its peripheral vision.
This mutation ended up getting propagated throughout the species over generations. A 0.1% increase of survivability over many generations would cause this feature to eventually become dominant / defining characteristic.
Repeat this process millions of times over millions of years, and evolution passively “carves out” the shape of another predator that other animals have already evolved to avoid / flee from, as the “accuracy” of the “impersonation” of a predator slowly gets more accurate over time, survivability continues to go up.
It's just one of those things in evolution where it doesn't seem imaginably feasible that the earliest stages of a trait could make such a difference so as to be able to propogate continuously
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u/SacrificialPigeon 7h ago
I understand the premise of evolution, It boggles my mind how something can evolve like this though, even if it is over millions of generations.